File transfer over SSH Authentication Agent

This is an old hack, don't use it.

Ever been logged in to a remote host via SSH, and thought "OK, I need that file there"?

ssh-xfer is the answer!

ssh-xfer is a hackish but handy way of transferring files from remote
hosts to your local computer. Firstly, you need to run a slightly modified SSH
authentication agent program on your local computer. Patches are available for
both OpenSSH and PuTTY, see below. If you haven't used a SSH agent program before, this article seems to be reasonable, or you can look at the OpenSSH/PuTTY docs.

You don't need any modifications to your ssh client or server programs - only the modified SSH authentication agent, and the extra ssh-xfer program.

Once you have the modified ssh-agent program running, you can use
ssh-xfer. On the remote computer you want to grab files from, you need a
compiled version of the ssh-xfer binary. This can be created by applying
the OpenSSH patch below to an OpenSSH 3.8.1p1 directory,
./configure, then make ssh-xfer.

To test it out, SSH to the remote host, making sure agent forwarding is on. Then try:

ssh-xfer somefilehere.txt

The file should magically appear at your local ~/Desktop, or
on your Windows desktop with the PuTTY patch. If you want a different path,
edit the patch. You can also go

cat somefilehere.txt | ssh-xfer nametocallfile.txt -

if you want to tranfer stdin. This is particularly useful
from within Mutt.

The patches

Be warned. This is a very hackish file transfer technique. The authors of these patches don't want to accept any blame at all if it somehow decides that the target file is /dev/disk0s3 and blats your disk. If you use this software, evaluate the risks yourself :) At the time of writing, the OpenSSH patch is 2 days old, and the PuTTY patch is hours old. Though they seem to work:

Against OpenSSH-3.8.1p1. This contains the patch for the actual ssh-xfer program, as well as the patched ssh-agent. You need this for the remote host, and for your local host if you run a Unix. Thanks to Bernard Blackham for testing it out and feedback on making it faster. Updated 2005-11-03 to include libgen.h so ssh-xfer won't segfault on platforms where sizeof(char*) != sizeof(int), and ssh-agent will be more reliable.

Against PuTTY (some version). This patches pageant/plink/putty to receive files. Beware that if a transfer fails, then the pageant might stop responding or something. Contributed by Andrew Francis, impressively quickly :)

How it works

Step one: send the filename in a packet. And wait for a response.

Step two: send a chunk of data. Then another. Then another. Don't wait for responses, since SSH has windowing etc in the channel layer anyway. I've managed 500kB/sec over wireless, so it seems fast enough.

Step three: send a finish packet. And wait for a response.

If you want more details, look at ssh-xfer.c, or ssh-agent.c, from the OpenSSH patch.